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Martin Parr, who died in December, at the age of seventy-three, had a specific paint color in mind for the first room of “Global Warning,” a retrospective of his photographs that’s currently on display at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. The show’s curator, Quentin Bajac, had suggested that they go with something classic—i.e., white—but Parr was very clear that he wanted a more exuberant hue. The one he chose might commonly be called bubblegum, but anyone who’s visited the show may be inclined to think of it forever after as Parr Pink: the pink of a hibiscus on a garishly printed bikini bottom, of bootleg perfume bottles, of diaper packages and cookie icing; the pink of slack mouths and dangling uvulas and nostrils shown so close up that you can see every last busted blood vessel, suggesting a lifetime of excess in a world of overconsumption.

Parr spent his career examining human appetites and the contradictions they engender, but his approach wasn’t always so frontal. One of the strengths of the Jeu de Paume show is that it comprises some hundred and eighty photographs made in the course of fifty years, not just instantly recognizable works such as Parr’s hyper-saturated portraits of oiled-up working-class vacationers at resorts in New Brighton or Benidorm.

In the early nineteen-eighties, for instance, Parr drove around the west coast of Ireland in a Morris Minor, documenting other, abandoned Morris Minors that dotted the landscape. Shot in black-and-white, the resulting photos have an elegiac quality and suggest the eventual mortality of any innovation or craze—ashes to ashes, rack-and-pinion steering to rack-and-pinion steering. They also make the case that Parr had a stronger conceptual bent than he is commonly given credit for: according to the rules he set for himself, anytime he saw a Morris he had to stop and shoot.

Parr went electric in 1983, inspired by John Hinde’s postcard photography and the pungent colors coming out of America in the work of Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. An image from Salford, England—I think it’s his masterpiece—shows a pair of women backed up against the pebble-dash wall of a supermarket, gripping the handles of their stuffed shopping carts. They look like racecar drivers getting ready to do battle on the homestretch. Behold the competition, pride, and preening aggression that Parr detects in our eternal need to prove ourselves through the things we buy!

Food is one of his favorite thunderdomes, and it’s interesting to compare his images of cakes and meats and popsicles to those of someone like the American painter Wayne Thiebaud. The artists share an attraction to the gleaming counters and alluring rows of postwar consumer culture, but Parr holds his gaze longer, seeking the nausea after the binge. At the Jeu de Paume, forty-two photographs from Parr’s “Common Sense” series are hung together in a grid. Wedged in among phallic pastries and slabs of iridescent ham is a portrait of a priest, cropped so tightly that practically all you see is a collar and a chin. Stray threads protrude from his cassock; the fabric looks so cheap you can practically hear it squeaking. It’s unclear whether we’re looking at a holy man or some dude who ordered a Halloween costume on Amazon.

Parr had to fight to get into Magnum, the prestigious photographic coöperative. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a co-founder of the agency, considered Parr’s work cruel and garish, reportedly telling him, “We’re from two different solar systems.” Parr thrust back: “I acknowledge there is a large gap between your celebration of life and my implied criticism of it. . . . What I would query with you is, Why shoot the messenger?” Eventually, the men reconciled and Parr became a Magnum man, sneaking in with just enough votes.

Despite his reputation for levity, he was a social photographer in his own way, a photographe de rue who stretched the purview of street photography to the realms of mass tourism and trash culture, where the high-minded humanists of yore deigned not go. A photograph of a towering woman gassing up a zippy little car and wearing a plaid skirt and a T-shirt that reads, incongruously, “I’d Rather Be Truckin’ ” brings to mind a Quentin Blake illustration: Miss Trunchbull for the age of fossil fuels.

Parr’s humor is also detectably British, with a poking quality that only rarely verges into outright peevishness. Some of his japes have dulled with age—a series of tourists wielding selfie sticks doesn’t pack the punch it might have when the technology, and the narcissism that it implied, seemed like a novel development. But works like a postcard-like shot of a postcard rack parked in the middle of a ski path in the Swiss Alps are undiminished in their power to make you laugh while wondering, fondly, what the hell is wrong with people. And his images of royal-kitsch grotesqueries—an abandoned Prince William mask amid the ketchup-and-vodka detritus of a street party celebrating his wedding—seem particularly apt as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to sully the House of Windsor. The Jeu de Paume show has been mobbed, to the point that the museum has added extended hours to accommodate the demand. You have to wonder what Parr would have made of his fans, queuing up in ponchos in the February drizzle. Would he have shot them as pilgrims or as chumps?

Cathédrale Notre-Dame, Paris, France, 1995.

What sets Parr’s jokes apart is that they’re not just visual. The conceptual intelligence of his early work—as in, say, a picture showing a grouping of stuffed animals arranged in front of the lace-curtained front window of a modest house in Ireland, rendering it a shadowbox theatre, carried through his œuvre. In one picture from 1995, a tourist in Paris maneuvers for the perfect shot of Notre-Dame’s spire. Parr has photographed him from behind, so that we see the world through his eyes without knowing his identity. All we can make out is his backward-facing baseball cap, reading, “New York Yankees.” It’s a wicked take on the persistence of human folly. Wherever you go, there’s Martin Parr.

Both the Democratic and Republican races in the Texas U.S. Senate primary are expected to be competitive. On the Democratic side, Jasmine Crockett, a U.S. House member from Dallas, is facing off against the state representative James Talarico. Crockett began to cultivate a national profile with a prime-time speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and has since become one of her party’s most popular messengers, using an often brash communication style to manufacture viral moments. Talarico, a former public-school teacher, enrolled in seminary while serving as a member of the Texas House of Representatives; he gained national attention after delivering a speech on the state-House floor, in which he criticized a Republican effort to require the state’s schools to display the Ten Commandments.

In the Republican primary, the incumbent Senator John Cornyn is facing challenges from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, and from Wesley Hunt, a congressman representing northwest Houston, in a race likely to go to a runoff in May. Paxton, a MAGA diehard who, as the state attorney general, sued to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential-election victory, has weathered a series of recent scandals. In 2023, he was impeached by the Texas House on charges of bribery and obstruction of justice, after allegedly using his office to benefit a Texas real-estate developer. (He was ultimately acquitted by the state Senate.) Paxton’s wife, a state senator, filed for divorce last summer on “biblical grounds,” amid accusations of adultery, which Paxton denies. Nonetheless, President Trump has declined to endorse any candidate in the race, saying instead, “I support all three.”

In the Texas gubernatorial primaries, both the incumbent Republican, Greg Abbott, and the Democratic state representative Gina Hinojosa are expected to move on to the general election. Abbott, whose campaign has reportedly raised a hundred and six million dollars, is seeking a fourth term, a feat that would be unprecedented in the state’s history. Trump has endorsed Abbott, praising him for his role in redrawing Texas’s congressional map last year to more heavily favor Republicans.

Before entering politics, Hinojosa, who represents a district in downtown Austin, worked as a lawyer for public-sector union employees. In 2012, after her son’s elementary school faced severe budget cuts, she ran for a seat on the Austin school board, and has made support for public education a major part of her campaign. Her main challengers in the Democratic primary are Chris Bell, a personal-injury lawyer and former U.S. congressman from Houston, and Bobby Cole, a dairy farmer who has never held elected office.

Emi Yagi’s slim and strangely exuberant second novel, “When the Museum Is Closed” (translated, from the Japanese, by Yuki Tejima), starts with a simple premise: its protagonist, Rika Horauchi, has a new part-time job. The nature of this job is fantastical to readers, but Yagi wastes no time on exposition; she simply drops us into a world that is half fairy tale, half workplace mundanity. Rika spends most of her days toiling in a frozen-foods warehouse, but her new gig is in a museum, where she has been hired to make conversation, in Latin, with an ancient Roman statue of the goddess Venus. Her efforts as Venus’ conversation partner are described with the same deadpan matter-of-factness as Rika’s warehouse job, making the latter seem just as strange and unrealistic as the former—and vice versa.

Rika is given the museum assignment because of her rare proficiency in Latin. We eventually learn that she is more comfortable speaking this dead classical language than she is speaking her native Japanese, and that it helps her overcome the debilitating social anxiety that often overwhelms her. This anxiety takes the physical form of a garish yellow raincoat that seemingly only Rika can see, providing a protective layer between herself and others. The layer is inconvenient at times—Rika is always hot and self-conscious about her sweat and body odor—but, on occasion, it has its uses. For example, when her short-term college boyfriend gets her alone and unceremoniously climbs atop her, “like he was experiencing some kind of attack,” she can mercifully “get through the sex without having to touch his skin.”

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As Rika has more and more encounters with Venus at the museum, she allows herself to grow close to her unlikely companion. Her protective layer thins; outside of work, she slowly develops bonds with her neighbors, an old woman and a perceptive, neglected child. Rika also allows herself to embrace her own desires, getting brightly colored highlights in her hair. She begins to feel the stirrings of physical yearning, as Venus asks her to consider her own experience and needs for the first time.

The frisson of attraction is palpable from their first meeting, when Venus insists that Rika receive a chair that’s the right size, a fuss that attention-shy Rika would never have made herself. The marble statue, who has had centuries to ponder her own desires and discomforts, must retrain the woman to put herself first; Venus asks, “in a tone one might use when checking the pockets of a child who’s been caught stealing,” if the chair is really comfortable. Rika reflects: “I considered the depth of the seat for the first time. I then focused on the position of my spine and the distance of my heels in relation to the floor, one by one, as though I were tracing an X-ray with my finger.”

As Venus educates Rika in the art of self-possession, we are only moderately surprised when Rika informs us, “I was in love with the marble goddess.” When she abruptly mentions that she and Venus “had sex for the first time”—a dreamy aesthetic experience that doesn’t require Rika to take off her clothes, much less her ever-present raincoat—the shock comes only in the impassive nature of the declaration, a persistent strength of Yagi’s. Prurient questions like “How?” and “What?” are simply elided here.

This knack for unexpected, absurd humor forms the backbone of Yagi’s first novel, “Diary of a Void,” from 2020. In that book, another dissatisfied employee, Shibata, discovers that her life at work improves drastically after she spontaneously decides to “get” pregnant. She does this by announcing her forthcoming maternity to her supervisors and to H.R. She is immediately relieved of her unofficial duties as the only woman in the office—making coffee, cleaning up, distributing snacks—and is encouraged to go home on time, instead of staying late, as she usually does. Like Rika, Shibata begins to take her own needs seriously, making herself healthy meals, exercising, doing exactly what she wants. “So this is pregnancy,” she thinks. “What luxury. What loneliness.”

The catch: Shibata isn’t actually pregnant. As the weeks go by, as her imaginary due date approaches and her lie grows steadily more absurd, we begin to wonder if Shibata is experiencing some kind of hysterical break; the novel slides from straight-faced realism into a kind of earnest speculative fiction, suspended in what the narrative theorist Tzvetan Todorov called “the fantastic,” the liminal zone between the uncanny and the marvellous. It remains in this in-between space as Shibata returns to work and continues to raise her imaginary son, and as the men in the office, denied their learned helplessness and dependence on Shibata, start to make their own coffee. The implication is not just that women are better off without men but that the opposite might also be true.

“When the Museum Is Closed” is enjoyable, but it lacks the essential and cutting ambiguity of its predecessor. Part of the charm and surprising triumph of “Diary of a Void” comes from its proximity to real life: How far can Shibata possibly take this deception? The book works because it keeps one foot in the real world of twenty-first-century Tokyo, a society genuinely made sicker by the lingering presence of debilitating gender norms. Interestingly, Yagi’s protagonists both gain new names once they are freed from the strictures of patriarchal society: Venus calls Rika Hora, while Shibata is called Sheeba by her new friends at prenatal aerobics.

The world of Venus and Rika, though, is vague. They talk in an unnamed museum in an unnamed city. Venus is amusingly casual and surprisingly more street-smart than Rika, despite her centuries-long captivity; beyond the shock of her attitude, though, we learn very little about her. One might think that an ancient living statue might be the most interesting character in this story, but we never discover what motivates her, beyond a clichéd desire to get out and see the world. The novel’s villain is the handsome male curator Hashibami, who wants Venus for himself; a consummate collector, he thinks of female beauty as something that can be revealed and perfected only by the male gaze. Hashibami, who we find out lives in the museum, seems to want both to possess Venus’ timeless beauty and to embody it himself. There’s a rich commonality between him and Venus that could be explored here—who’s manipulating Rika more? But the novel ultimately retreats from these complicating questions. The final message is a little too clear; the fairy-tale setting makes the fairy-tale plot too easy.

Yagi’s books belong to a rising tide in Japanese film and literature, one that suggests men are simply incorrigible, and that the conventional marriage plot is a relic. While in America we wring our hands about heterofatalism or the male-loneliness crisis, Yagi can seem almost phlegmatic in her misandry: her characters are better off with an imaginary baby or a talking statue than with an adult human man. Other examples of this motif include Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” (in which the narrator decides to have a child on her own, a choice still unusual in Japan) and Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman” (which contains one of the most repellent male characters in recent memory). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s bracing Netflix series “Asura,” which follows four sisters who discover that their aging father has had an affair, is set in the oft-nostalgized Shōwa period (1926-89), demonstrating how misogyny has long been at the root of Japanese family and popular culture. These are all refreshing correctives to the texts that previously stood in for contemporary Japan internationally, including any number of small volumes about magical cafés, bookshops, or libraries, often with cats on their covers.

“Diary of a Void” subverts these familiar gendered tropes through its discomfiting blurring of fiction and reality. We are unsure whether Shibata has entered her own phantasmagoric reality or learned to game the system; to do one, we realize, perhaps requires the other. The novel ends happily—but we’re not sure for whom. In “When the Museum Is Closed,” Yagi’s unnerving effects are stifled by the novel’s pat surrealism. What could have been a biting portrait of the glorification of female beauty is softened by a simple happy ending—in a world where no ending can possibly be simple, whether happy or not. ♦

In the state’s U.S. Senate primaries, both the former Democratic governor Roy Cooper and the Republican strategist Michael Whatley are expected to easily win their respective races. North Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, but Cooper, a moderate who’d been in elected office for more than three decades, left the governor’s office with an approval rating of over fifty per cent. Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who has never been elected to public office, declared his candidacy last summer, shortly after the incumbent, the Republican senator Thom Tillis, announced that he would not seek reëlection. A perennial battleground state, North Carolina was carried by Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election by three percentage points, while Josh Stein, a Democrat, won the gubernatorial race that year by more than fourteen points.

In North Carolina’s First Congressional District, the incumbent Don Davis, a Democrat, is waiting to see which of five G.O.P. primary candidates he will face in November. Davis was reëlected in 2024 by less than two points; the following year, Republican lawmakers in Raleigh redrew the state’s electoral maps to make the district more favorable to their own party. If the G.O.P. manages to flip the district in the general election, the seat would be held by a Republican for the first time since 1883. In the Democratic stronghold of North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District, meanwhile, the incumbent, Valerie Foushee, is facing a primary rematch against Durham County commissioner Nida Allam, who is backed by prominent progressive Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.